4of4Among works on view through March 7 in "International Discoveries V" at FotoFest is Jungho Jung's "Tension in Black IV." ﻿Photo: Jungho Jung

The 12 artists featured in FotoFest's "International Discoveries V" all present intriguing bodies of work, mostly in black-and-white, including beautiful traditional portraits and documentary images whose subjects have dramatic stories.

But aesthetically, the big surprises are by four photographers who work in the abstract, filling the spaces of their prints through diverse techniques.

Roberto Fernández Ibâñez, a Uruguayan artist whose work has been widely exhibited (including at FotoFest, so he's not exactly a discovery), created and captured mixed-media assemblages for his "Mountains of Uncertainty" series. A trained chemist who uses his own formulas, Ibâñez has distressed and molded what look like sheets of thin plastic into imaginary landscapes.

They evoke craggy, textural places of the mind. Examine the labels, and you realize each image also mimics a statistical graph reporting macroeconomic data or projections - "Gasoline use in Los Angeles from 1960-2010," for example, or "Global unemployment trends 2002-2016." Data as the stuff of dreams, or just a reminder that facts always can be manipulated? Either way, it's worth contemplating.

Korean artist Do-yeon Gwon has photographed discarded books in profile, with a few pertinent pages peeking out toward his camera. Books, as a kind of endangered species, have provided a number of photo-based artists with beautiful material. Manual's digitally composed, crisp "Now and Then" projects and Cara Barer's near-floral patterns created from books turned inside-out come immediately to mind, but there are others.

Gwon's photographs are more straightforward, documenting battered dictionaries reclaimed from a wastepaper treatment facility. Their covers are gone, so the paper has curled up and crinkled. The readable bits that poke out give you just enough information - part of an illustration or a page number or a few teasing words - to make you wish you could open them and read them. They are celebrated purely as objects, but clearly are objects with a past.

"For me, showing the existence otherwise hidden in the instrumental form of an object has become important: Photography is 'the proof of the existence' of the invisible," Gwon explains in his statement.

The series "White Utterance," by Korea's Jungho Jung, looks completely different from Gwon's work but also riffs on what we cannot see. He wants to "document the visible while referencing the invisible," he writes. Wandering through snow and captivated by its whiteness, he took photographs randomly, without regard for conventional composition.

In the process, he caught patches that reveal who knows what - exposed asphalt, maybe, or something dark seeping up in the shape of a lily pad, or patches of cracked ice caught just-so in the light. They seem to reveal the poetic in the mundane. Some of his images are as richly toned and minimal as Richard Serra drawings. It's hard for a photograph to do better than that.

Argentina's Marcela Magno also focused on the ground, but from a far, far higher distance, for her "Land" series. She's employed Google Earth satellite maps to examine "how utopias of modernity are converted into dystopian outcomes," she writes.

At first glance, all the connected dots across the landscapes of Magno's images look like they could be constellations. In fact, they depict something much uglier: the topography of Argentinean oil fields and their waste. While the reality behind them may be ugly, the images themselves are beautiful, with an epic sensibility.

Ibâñez is among the far-flung "Discoveries V" artists who will be at FotoFest Thursday for a reception. Chris Bartlett, Hankoo Lee, Hector Rene Membreno-Canales, Hosang Park and Sebastián Szyd also are scheduled to be there.

Molly Glentzer, a staff arts critic since 1998, writes mostly about dance and visual arts but can go anywhere a good story leads. Through covering public art in parks, she developed a beat focused on Houston's emergence as one of the nation's leading "green renaissance" cities.

During about 30 years as a journalist Molly has also written for periodicals, including Texas Monthly, Saveur, Food & Wine, Dance Magazine and Dance International. She collaborated with her husband, photographer Don Glentzer, to create "Pink Ladies & Crimson Gents: Portraits and Legends of 50 Roses" (2008, Clarkson Potter), a book about the human culture behind rose horticulture. This explains the occasional gardening story byline and her broken fingernails.

A Texas native, Molly grew up in Houston and has lived not too far away in the bucolic town of Brenham since 2012.